Diego Salazar

Vice President of Engineering

About Me

Passionate about code quality, style, and maintainability. I enjoy teaching, playing music, and riding bikes.

I started writing code back in the MySpace days (2006) tweaking HTML/CSS. In my job as an IT tech I realized a paper based method of record keeping could be made more efficient and less error prone if I created an app for it. I sat down to read a few chapters of PHP/MySQL and realized I was a natural at understanding code and logic. I fell in love with building apps and taught myself enough to get hired professionally as a web developer.

I continued soaking up books, articles, documentation, and QAs to get to where I am today.

Now, I specialize in complex multi-process systems in service oriented architectures. I'm proficient in migrating monolithic Rails apps to hybrid service oriented designs. I write developer tools for automation and productivity. I enthusiastically talk about code and mentor coworkers and juniors.

I love conversing about science and I'll talk about the universe for hours.

Personal Projects

An HTML5/Canvas/Javascript implementation of the famous cellular automaton Conway's Game of Life

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.

The "game" is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves, or, for advanced "players", by creating patterns with particular properties.

Volunteer

Taught a class on building a web server with Ruby from scratch. Wrote the curriculum material and led a class through implementing their own handcrafted Ruby server. Answered questions and encouraged students to further use their creation.

Work Experience

Kipu Systems is a SAAS based medical software company specializing in EMR and lab integrations where I lead a team of software engineers and liaise with other departments and third parties. I am the goto senior engineer for programming help and questions for the team. I consult the CTO on software related challenges. I am a lead architect on software projects. I improve collaboration and planning by researching and applying appropriate tools and processes. I mentor junior engineers and conduct code reviews and pair programming sessions. I'm in charge of technical interviews and have a final say on hiring. I plan sprints, improve documentation and the onboarding process for new hires.

Highlights:

Lead the growth of a team of 3 software engineers into a team of 20, meanwhile the company grew from dozens to hundreds of clinical facility clients.

Instituted team policies and software tools for collaboration, communication, and remote work.

Designed and built a high reliability asynchronous API architecture supporting millions of request per second

Architected a fault tolerant service oriented architecture framework. Lead internal software projects and pair programmed through feature development. Developed and maintained user facing features as well as internal apps. Was on standby for emergency situations and successfully debugged and fixed live production code on multiple occasions. Improved and refactored legacy code and tests. Presented research projects to the team to evangelize state of the art techniques and paradigms.

Highlights:

Designed and built a service oriented framework with asynchronous message passing and message delivery reliability.

Architected an application framework from the ground up. Lead development of a new business. Created platform for admins, site owners, and users to efficiently search for and rent self storage units. Lead marketing efforts and provided direction on all matters of development and marketing in a startup environment. Setup office network with Active Directory and installed computes, a server, and backups.

Highlights:

Designed and built a SAAS platform for self storage marketing, search, and booking.

Started as a freelancer and then teamed up with my brother and a friend to develop apps for businesses. Provided website and web app development services to small businesses and professionals. Developed a customizable and themable open source CMS system for reuse in all web app projects. Mentored an intern through sales and client meetings. Executed marketing and sales responsibilities. Provided maintenance and support. Performed devops duties and automation.

Highlights:

Built a highly customizable and theme-able Rails based Content Management System.

Developed a mobile app for tracking ingress and egress of truck drivers in the port yard as an improvement of a paper based workflow. Provided IT support for the administrative office in the port. Ran and installed ethernet cabling, solar powered WIFI access points in key location in the port yard, and troubleshooted computer and various device issues. Installed an asset management system and registered all office assets.